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Japan's second-largest carrier, KDDI, has developed a subscription service for applications called AU Smartpass. The service includes access to 500 apps pre-installed in Android phones. "KDDI splits overall subscription revenues back with developers based on monthly active usage. Developers can also offer in-app purchases, but they get to keep 80 to 90 percent of revenue instead of the standard 70 percent that Google Play or Apple's app store gives them," Kim-Mai Cutler writes.

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Little Eye Labs is refining the applications-testing process by allowing developers to crash test apps on the day of launch instead of cleaning up after release as programs such as Crashlytics, Bugsense and Crittercism encourage, Kim-Mai Cutler writes. "We want to catch the bugs before the app reaches the app store," Little Eye Labs co-founder Kumar Rangarajan says.

AppGlu is introducing a service to help the untechnical business side of application development companies mind their releases for relevancy, updates, bug fixes and the like, Jolie O'Dell writes. "Developers focus on developing the apps and getting them to launch, and after launch, business people take on the management and maintenance of the app," AppGlu's Adam Fingerman says.

Facebook wants to bring on 150 developers and employ them in a temporary Vancouver, British Columbia, office, conspicuously close to Seattle, while the new engineers await American work permits, Alex Wilhelm writes. "[T]hat the company is willing to invest capital in the area simply to create a feeder conduit to its U.S. offices says two things: Facebook wants to keep its engineers in only a select few locations ... and that the United States as a country is hamstringing itself with its current immigration policy," he writes.

Facebook's mobile-application ads have been tested by about 20% of the elite iOS developers, Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg says. That's good news for Facebook, which sees the ads as one of the few ways to earn revenue from its developer ecosystem on mobile platforms. "Facebook can't derive fees or virtual currency revenue from mobile apps, because they exist on platforms operated by ... Google and Apple. As users have migrated to mobile devices, Facebook's payments revenues has stalled because of this," Kim-Mai Cutler writes.

Application developers such as Storm8 unwrapped big numbers on Christmas, Kim-Mai Cutler writes. The casual gaming company saw 2 million downloads on Christmas, along with 2.5 million hours of gameplay and more than quadruple the normal average revenue per daily active user. Top in-app items include a virtual holiday tree, gingerbread purse and snow globe, according to this infographic.